Year 18, Day 55 - 2/24/26 - Movie #5,255
BEFORE: After the previous snowstorm that hit the tri-state area, we lost power in several rooms for a few days - now we've been hit with an even bigger storm and so far we've kept our power, but we lost our internet and cable. Whose bright idea was it to have those two things come from the same provider? I can't continue to do this without both cable AND internet, I mean I could watch the movies that are already in my possession and on the non-popular DVD format, but the chain often needs streaming if it's going to continue. Also, the DVR I have won't even access the movies that it already recorded unless the entire system is working, someone really should be fired for designing a system that bad. I mean the movie is THERE, recorded on THIS device right in front of me, and I can't watch it because of an outage? That's an epic design flaw, right? I should at least be able to turn the unit on and watch the digital files on it while the main system is down, but that's not where we find ourselves. If my internet is down, I can still listen to all my music via iTunes, because all the files live on my computer. Just saying.
Emma Thompson carries over from "The Love Punch", and she'll be here tomorrow, too, at which point we're going to be faced with an 8-way tie of actors with four appearances, so that means there's no clear leader this year, we'll have to wait to see if any of them pop up frequently during the Doc Block - probably Bill Murray, given the way things are going with my documentary field tests.
Here's the line-up for Day 13 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", for Wednesday, 2/25. The two themes are "Oscar Goes Back for Even More (Remakes)" and "Oscar Goes to Church". Oh, great...
4:00 pm "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1941)
3:15 am "The Shoes of the Fisherman" (1968)
THE PLOT: A retired school teacher is yearning for some adventure, and some sex. She has a plan, which involves hiring a young sex worker named Leo Grande.
AFTER: Well, this is a twist on the typical person-hires-sex-worker or "hooker with a heart of gold" movies, because it features a woman hiring the services of a male prostitute. (Is "sex worker" really better than "prostitute"? I'm not sure...) The circumstances dictate that this is an older woman, someone who has not had sex in a long while, not since her husband died, anyway, and even before that, the sex wasn't that great, you know, because they were married a long time ago, things were different back then, also, they were British, so that's like a triple whammy of bad sex, I guess.
"Nancy" (not her real name) is very nervous in her first encounter with Leo, and then the second time they get together, she's more clinical, as in she's got a checklist of sexual things she's never done that she wants to get to. Well, sure, if you take away the romantic part then it's just a series of specific actions, positions to try and boxes to tick, err, so to speak. But that's taking all the fun out of it, isn't it? Leo understands this and tries to get Nancy where she wants to go, but by using dancing to music, and touching, and asking questions about her life, not just letting her try oral sex on a guy with no build-up.
If it's a bit cliché to depict an older British woman who never had an orgasm during sex with her husband, it's even more cliché to assume that someone is doing sex work because they failed at everything else, or because they were screwed up sexually in the past and are working through some things. Yet the latter is also where we find ourselves, obviously "Leo Grande" isn't this guy's real name either, but when Nancy does a little cyber-sleuthing in-between their encounters and figures out his real name, that's like a betrayal, a definite no-no in this relationship, which was supposed to be somewhat professional and also completely anonymous.
The tables get turned during their final meeting, because Becky, the waitress in the hotel cafe, recognizes Nancy as her former R.E. teacher back in high school. I had to look that one up - "R.E." stands for "Religious Education" and apparently that's a part of the curriculum in the U.K., since they don't have the same separation of church and state as we do, the government runs the Anglican church and so it's worked right into the school system. Parents can apparently opt their students out of R.E. but probably very few people do. Anyway the waitress obviously knows Nancy's real name, and then Nancy feels the need to apologize to Becky, for telling her that it was wrong for girls to dress like sluts and to behave morally upright at all times. Well, Nancy never really knew that she was going to hire a sex worker in the future, did she?
Despite a few bumps in the road, these encounters do change both participants for the better - Nancy still has some way to go on her sexual journey, but Leo has proven that the journey is worth taking - and even though Leo didn't want Nancy's help or advice when it came to re-connecting with his family, he does reveal at the end that he has been in touch with his brother, although not his mother, who basically has disowned him. This turned out to be a very simple story, but you know, sometimes all you need to make a movie is two actors and a hotel room.
This film premiered at Sundance in 2022, which of course is a January thing, and then it was nominated for four BAFTAs, which I think is a February thing - so very seasonally timely. A couple of the later sex scenes reminded me of the one Emma Thompson did in a movie called "The Tall Guy" with Jeff Goldblum back in the day - of course, in that one an upright piano was involved. I guess maybe it was just that the same actress held her arms above her head the same way while she was having a certain kind of sex...
Directed by Sophie Hyde
Also starring Daryl McCormack (last seen in "Twisters"), Isabella Laughland (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Les Mabaleka, Lennie Beare, Carina Lopes, Charlotte Ware.
RATING: 6 out of 10 school essays copied from Wikipedia
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